


where do lonely hearts go?

by jokeperalta



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Presents, F/M, Light Angst, Loneliness, Pining, Post-Season/Series 01, Separations, but I do, i don't know why i keep writing fics in which karen's fire escape plays a major role, it's actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-18 05:17:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13093188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: Karen and Frank and Christmas in the aftermath of The Punisher.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title from All Alone On Christmas by Darlene Love-- absolute _banger_ of a christmas song. highly recommended from me, a random mediocre fanfic author on the internet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from All Alone On Christmas by Darlene Love-- absolute _banger_ of a christmas song. highly recommended from me, a random mediocre fanfic author on the internet

There are certain moments in her life since inadvertently associating herself with several known vigilantes that Karen is certain anyone looking in on her life from the outside would wonder, quite rightly, whether she’s actually out of her mind.

This is one of those times.

She’s always hated wrapping Christmas presents. In her youth, she always used to bribe Kevin into wrapping hers as well as his own because he had the patience for it. Not like her.

It’s not as though she has that many to wrap of course, her social life being what it is. Just a little something for Foggy, a bottle of Whiskey for Ellison that just needs a gift bag, and a new jigsaw to send to her parents— the same as every year.

Perhaps what’s making things worse this year is just having to look down at her latest impulse buy, and think about how stupid it is, how ridiculous anyone else would think it was that she’s bought a present for the fucking _Punisher_.

Karen doesn’t know where he is. Whatever happened at the park carousel with Russo was reported (that she had to find out about from reading her own paper) but his name goes unmentioned in every report she can get her hands on. Even the ones she’s not supposed to have her hands on at all.

Karen knows better than to think that means he was sat at wherever home is for him these days, feet up and watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians when all that went down.

Getting even the most marginal confirmation from Madani that he was still alive was like getting blood out of a stone. She got there in the end, but somehow didn’t feel much better for it.

On a particularly desperate day, she even tracked down David Lieberman -or rather, the Lieberman family. She drove all the way out to the suburbs on a crisp Saturday morning in late November. For a while she just sat in her car, looking between the address she’d scrawled down on her scruffy reporter’s notebook and the decidedly ordinary house in front of her. Tried to think of what to say.

She got only as far as stepping out of her car, in the end. The door of his house opened at almost the exact same moment, and she might have approached him then— if it had just been him. Instead, the whole Lieberman family was suddenly in front of her, heading to their own car for some kind of day out: a young boy and a girl talking excitedly, husband and wife following behind and interjecting comments into the conversation.

They all looked so happy.

It reminded her of something, long distant but treasured, that she’d felt once. They’d looked like her family, before everything went to shit and she never got that feeling back and had longed for it ever since.

But David Lieberman had.

Abruptly she’d known she’d made a mistake in coming. She’d been selfish, as usual. David Lieberman wasn’t the means to an end trying to find Frank. There were more important things going on here.

Just before getting into his car, David Lieberman had looked right at her. Stared at her, even. Karen had had no doubt that he somehow knew exactly who she was and what she was there for. She had watched his mouth open as though to form her name, and he took a step forward.

Karen had swung open her car door and got in, trapping her coat in the door in her haste but not caring. She drove away too quickly, back to her cold apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and scribbled out her long night’s worth of David Lieberman research.

Which is still as close as she ever got to any kind of lead on where he is. Makes buying presents for him the equivalent of buying for a ghost, even if he is still physically alive somewhere.

The presents are what would to anyone else amount to gag gifts, but seeing them in two different shops in one day had reminded her so intensely of him that she’d felt a choked laugh catch in her throat and had to blink away tears surrounded by harried and unforgiving Christmas shoppers.

The first is a bag of coffee grounds, big block lettering declaring it _FUCKING STRONG COFFEE._ The second, a stainless steel travel mug, printed with _I Like Big Mutts And I Cannot Lie._

She bought them before the impulse faded; or rather, before the rich fantasy of him turning up on her doorstep on Christmas Eve so neither of them had to spend it alone leeched to grey and turned brittle in the face of reality.

Still, now she has them, she might as well wrap the damn things.

 

 

-

 

 

One by one her already small pile of presents dwindles:

She posts the jigsaw to Vermont, and has lunch with Foggy for the first time in months. She gives Ellison his whiskey at the staff Christmas party, coupled with a card apologising for the death threats and FBI raids she’s subjected the paper to this year, and promising to do better next year.

And then it’s just his left. Sitting on her coffee table in its shiny paper. Mocking her with its futility. Somehow it becomes a symbol of everything that’s shitty about Christmas this and pretty much every year since Kev died.

Like the fact that the entirety of her festive plans consist of the same stilted phone call to her parents that she has every Christmas Day.

Karen requests all the holiday work she can, because the last thing she needs is to have all the time in the world to think about how alone she is. Working on Christmas out of desire rather than need has a touch of the pathetic about it too, and yet still seems better than getting drunk in her pyjamas and binging on her chocolate stash.

By the time Christmas Eve rolls around, she’s sick to death of the sight of the stupid fucking thing. How it collects dust, and how he’s built like a brick outhouse but still somehow can’t manage the weight of a phone in his hand to let her know he’s alive.

She shoves the wrapped box outside on the steps of her fire escape in the morning before work, as though he might drop by to pick it up (as though they’re anything approaching _normal_ ) but honestly not caring if someone steals it. At least then she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

As an afterthought, she throws the pot of roses she still tends (like the fool she is) in the window too. She hasn’t done since that night when they met at the waterfront, though she’s been tempted more than a few times.

See if that gets his attention. 

 

 

-

 

 

It’s gone when she gets back.

At first, she doesn’t even notice. Too busy stewing. She might be the only person in the world who gets annoyed at being told she _doesn’t_ have to work Christmas day. Ellison informed her that her services were not required, in his words, as they had more than enough cover to get them through until the twenty-sixth. Karen smelt bullshit: this was Ellison dad’ing her, stopping her working and trying to enforce holiday cheer on her unwillingly.

She told him as much, and he threatened to have her forcibly removed by security if she so much as appears on the premises tomorrow.

Karen kicks her heels off, sending them flying across the room like patent leather projectiles, and scans the venue for her Christmas-day-for-one. The only concession to the season she’d made was a two-foot plastic tree, which had been an attempt to liven the place up but somehow looks even more paltry in the absence of anything else to match.

Her gaze hits the window. The roses. And nothing else.

It’s really gone. She even opens the window and sticks her hand out on the steps, looks up and down for it, not quite believing the evidence of her own eyes.

Whatever petty thief was dedicated enough to climb all the way up here probably deserves to have it anyway. 

 

 

-

 

 

Bleary-eyed the next morning, Karen presses the Home button on her phone. She sees the date, then rolls over and goes back to sleep.

It’s coming up for eleven by the time she drags herself out of bed. Since the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future failed to put in an appearance last night, she’s as fed up with it all as she ever has been.

She’s at her refrigerator holding a bottle of milk when she sees it. A bottle that very nearly meets its end on her kitchen floor as a result.

Her heart stops, and then stutters like machine gun fire.

The rectangular box on her fire escape is wrapped in cartoon Santa paper and looks like a car ran over it, and somehow she’d expect nothing less.

In the box, under deep purple tissue paper, is a butter-soft brown leather notebook- beautiful and probably expensive as hell. The kind of thing she’d never think of buying for herself. The initials ‘K.P’ are embossed on the spine. It makes her coffee grounds and mug look pretty puny, actually.

The inside cover has his harsh chicken scratch script, where he’s copied out the first stanza of ‘In the bleak midwinter’ by Christina Rossetti. Underneath he’s written:

 _I’m sorry. I’ll see you soon_.

He hasn’t signed it.

But then, he didn’t need to.

Written rather than spoken, yet something about the last sentence takes her back to the hotel again, an arm bearing down on her collar bone and a dead man switch behind her, how he vowed he’d come for her and she’d never doubted it for a second. It has the same character, if not the same intensity.

He really knows how to get her, she'll give him that much. Trust Frank to write the six words in all the world that has her forgiving him for months of radio silence.

 

-

 

Karen traces the words he's written under her index finger: trying to draw him out from them, to conjure him from nothing.

"Happy Christmas, Frank," she says.

She can almost pretend he hears her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] you _can_ actually buy the products Karen buys for Frank in this fic [here](https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/558142186/funny-veterinarian-gift-dog-lover-travel?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=i%20like%20big%20mutts&ref=sr_gallery_16) and [here](https://www.firebox.com/Fcking-Strong-Coffee/p6515?via=related-products) \- i mean... you probably can't buy them in NYC shops but allow me some creative license on that one
> 
> [2] i have a Frank POV companion to this in the works - i wrote it almost concurrently to this so it is nearly done. i hope to post it before christmas but i am a human disaster so don't quote me on that.
> 
> [3] the lines from 'In the bleak midwinter' by Christina Rossetti- yes, i did sort of steal this character trait from Tommy Shelby of peaky blinders but i like to imagine the poem would appeal to Frank as well!  
>  _In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,_  
>  _Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;_  
>  _Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,_  
>  _In the bleak midwinter, long ago._
> 
> [3] please please let me know what you think! i love reading your thoughts :)


	2. Chapter 2

 

Frank takes a look at the (unknown) number, somehow knows who it’s gonna be before he picks up.

“What d’you want, Lieberman?”

The background noise -chatter, kids cheering, Christmas music- makes it hard to hear anything.

“Well, I’m doing just _grand_ , Francis, thank you kindly for asking.” Frank rolls his eyes, ignores him. “Just at the mall right now- I tell you one thing, being legally dead and underground really does change your perspective on shit. I used to hate Christmas shopping, but God, I think I wanted to see the mall Santa more than the kids did. Sarah had to physically restrain me from buying this huge inflatable reindeer for the front lawn- I still maintain it would have looked awesome. They all say hi, by the way.”

“Tell ‘em I said hi back.”

“Will do. Hey, so, the reason I called-”

“Glad you got there in the end.”

“Har, har. Anyway, er, I’m pretty sure your Karen Page was outside my house this morning.”

Frank drops his book on the floor, sits up straighter. His trigger finger starts tapping the back of the phone almost instantly. “Is she all right? What’d she say to you?”

“She seemed fine, far as I could see. And I didn’t get a chance to say anything to her, she drove off as soon as I saw her.”

Frank tries to work out what Lieberman is getting at, what he isn’t saying. “Hey, man… you got nothing to worry about with Karen. I know these journalist types can be real scum, but Karen’s not. She’s good people.”

“Oh yeah, no, I know that,” Lieberman says quickly. “Call me crazy, but I actually got the impression it was you she wanted to ask me about, not my miraculous return from the dead. She looked, I don’t know- _worried_.”

Frank doesn’t -can’t- answer. Guilt prickles the back of his neck.

“I just thought you’d want to know. Maybe drop her a line or whatever it is you crazy kids do these days. I know you’re bad at the whole communicating-with-other-human-beings shit, but you might wanna give it a try, at least.”

“I’m just… layin’ low for a little bit,” he attempts by way of explanation. Sounds like bullshit, even to him. He tries again, “After Bill, and the whole thing with that, I just can’t drag her into my shit right now. It ain’t fair on her.”

“Right, yeah. Unfair. A bit like letting someone who cares about you worry unnecessarily.”

There it is, the truth he’s been trying to avoid thinking about laid out bare in Lieberman’s annoying voice. The laying low stuff was true, but if he’s brutally honest with himself, it isn’t the only thing stopping him.

Hearing it from someone else -Lieberman, of all people- shatters the illusion he’d been crafting for himself; that if he just left her to herself she could just get on with her life.

“I guess I’m not one to talk,” Lieberman continues. “But just, you know- think about it. It’s _Christmas_.”

Something about the way he says it reminds him of Alan Rickman in that movie Maria used to love and Frank used to pretend to hate. The boss trying to matchmake Laura Linney and the hot Brazilian guy. He’s not sure why that association is the first to come to mind, and it’s on the long list of things he doesn’t want to examine too closely.

 

-

 

After Lieberman hangs up, Frank is restless. Too worked up to concentrate on much of anything, so he gets his boots on and goes out.

He walks briskly, deliberately in the direction away from Karen’s apartment. Somehow he knows if he sees her building right now, he’ll not be able to stop himself and all will be lost. He’s not ready for that, not yet.

So he walks. Thinks about Karen outside Lieberman’s house, worried -if Lieberman’s right and Frank hates to admit it, but probably is this time- for him. How much godforsaken time has passed since that elevator.

It’s dark out before he even bothers to take stock of where he is in any conscious way.

He’s in the boutique part of town, plate glass panels full of white light bright enough to expose a man’s secrets and minimalist displays without prices. The type of shops that make him feel itchy and out of place just by existing in their vicinity.

Frank walks faster.

A high-end stationers window catches his eye. He stops and stares in for a while, chewing over a thought in his head, till he meets eyes with the woman behind the counter and she smiles welcomingly at him through the window.

He’s still not sure what the hell he’s doing when he walks in and approaches her.

“Can I, er, get one of them leather notebooks you got in your window? The smaller one?”

She smiles warmly, like he’s just made her goddamn day. “Of course, sir. If you’d like, we can emboss up to three characters on the spine too- free of charge.”

Frank thinks, then nods. “Yeah, that’d be good.” He looks down at his hands. There’s still gunpowder under his nails, stark against the white pristineness of the backdrop. “It’s the initials ‘K.P’”

“Certainly, sir.” She puts this into her iPad, then glances up at him. “Would this be a treat for yourself or a gift?”

“A gift.” An apology.

“Whoever it is must be a special person,” she says. She probably says this a hundred times a day at this time of year but manages to make it sound like the company he keeps and gifts expensively to is better than anyone she’s ever spoken to.

She doesn’t even know she’s right about that this time.

“She is,” he says quietly. “She really is.”

 

 

-

 

 

He isn’t even sure how he’s going to get it to her, doesn’t think that far ahead when he buys it. Really, he just wants her to know he hasn’t (couldn’t) forget her. That he’s thinking of her.

But it’s been too long for him to just show up on her doorstep. She’d slam the door in his face, and he wouldn’t blame her.

In any case, he still doesn’t feel secure enough in his new identity to be seen going into her building. It might say Peter Castiglione on his IDs these days, but there’s a still a shit tonne of people who want Frank Castle dead and that’s a risk he isn’t willing to pass on to her. Not until the dust has settled, and he still doesn’t know quite when that will be.

For a while he just hangs on to it. Looks at the box on his desk in his shoebox apartment. One night he even attempts to wrap it, but he’s always been terrible at that shit. He can’t even handle a rectangular box. Maria could handle all the weird-shaped toys Lisa and Frankie asked for like a pro (all those toy dinosaurs), she made it look like the presents on TV ads with bells and whistles and everything.

Karen’s present looks like an explosion in a wrapping paper factory when he’s finished with it; corners sticking out where they shouldn’t be, the places he ripped the paper fixed with more paper. Copious amounts of tape hold the whole thing together uncertainly.

Not that it matters, if he won’t let himself go near her to give it to her.

The only thing he will allow himself is a twice-weekly ‘evening stroll’ that circles her building from every angle. He’s memorised what side and how far down the building her window is, careful to watch out for any sign of flowers.

They never appear. It’s for the best, really, and yet some days he longs for the excuse they’d give him. He could break his own rules if he saw them. He could drop everything, risk everything, and just…. see her. 

 

-

 

He’s working on the construction sites most of Christmas, because there’s never enough guys around this time of year and it suits him to not have to think too hard about what day it is and all the associated memories that go with it. Plus, if him taking hours means some poor guy who actually has a family to be with gets a bit more time off than he usually would, then everyone wins.

It’s Christmas Eve apparently, and he’s building a wall. He isn’t sure what the wall will become, but he’s building it anyway. That’s his life now.

His jeans buzz around lunch time.

_(Unknown) You got mail - Flowers on KP Cam._

Half a minute later:

_(Unknown) Was not being creepy- was in the process of disabling it._

Frank doesn’t even bother answering. It’s not his lunch break but he leaves the site anyway: supervision is scant to say the least and it’s not like he doesn’t put his hours in. He’s there much quicker than it should take, weaving through pedestrians and taking a couple of reckless risks in the midday traffic- and wouldn’t it be ironic if this was the thing that finally took him out?

The flowers are there all right- indistinct but unmistakable. He’s pretty sure they’re the same roses he gave her. There’s also something brightly coloured on the fire escape in front of the window. He can’t see what it is from this distance.

The flowers are enough justification for him to give the place a once over anyway.

Just to check everything is where it should be.

Not to see her. Not necessarily. Maybe she isn’t in. And he’s not sure if the flowers even mean that to her anymore, after everything.

Frank takes the direct route: the fire escape. He’s glad he didn’t think to remove the high-vis vest and hard hat before he left. In this context, the name ‘high visibility’ is the height of irony. Nobody looks twice at a guy on a fire escape if he looks like he’s got a reason to be there.

The brightly coloured thing, he realises, is a Christmas present.

 _For the only ghost in New York,_ the tag reads. _Happy Christmas, wherever you are._

The tone of hopelessness about it cuts like knives. She isn’t angry, she isn’t demanding answers or trying to track him down- she didn’t even talk to Lieberman when she had the chance. She’s just wishing him a good Christmas.

She’s still all heart, after everything.

The apartment itself looks empty and undisturbed. Nothing out of place. No Karen either, and he tries to convince himself that’s for the best.

Frank goes back to the construction site with the present under his arm. He doesn’t open it. He builds his wall with it next to him. He looks at it every now and again, running grimy fingers over the shiny paper.

He almost wants to keep it as it is forever. The first present anyone’s given him since Maria and the kids’ last Christmas. The first time since then that anyone’s given enough of a shit about him to think about him at this time of year.

And of course, it had to be Karen Page. It had to be.

 

 

-

 

 

It’s dark out by the time he gets back to his place.

He sets the present down on his desk, in the perfect centre, and leaves it there while he goes about his evening rituals. He showers, changes into sweats and a hoodie, heats up a soup for himself and only sits down to open it when he’s satisfied he’s finished everything he feels needs doing.

Frank slides his fingers under the tape, unfolds the paper carefully instead of ripping it.

He pulls out two things. A pouch of _Fucking Strong Coffee_ grounds, and a box. The travel mug inside it says _I Like Big Mutts And I Cannot Lie._

Frank stares at them.

Then he laughs. It almost surprises him, the way it sounds when it comes from him.

He laughs so hard his stomach starts to ache and tears roll down his cheeks. Old broken and healed ribs start to complain but if there was a gun to his head, he couldn’t stop. He has to brace his hands on the side of his desk and breathe hard through his nose just to regain some kind of composure.

When he finally calms down, still smiling and shaking his head, something he didn’t realise was coiled in him feels looser. It’s very freeing- to laugh so long and so hard. And he’s grateful, strangely, that it’s still possible. That he’s still capable of it.

It feels like… something important. Like progress, of a sort.

He can still feel joy. He hasn’t lost joy in rage and grief and destruction. He wants to tell Curtis, and tell the group.

Tell Karen. Thank Karen, for giving that to him.

But he can’t do that. Not yet.

There is something he can do. 

 

-

 

Frank leaves his gift for her on her fire escape in the early hours of Christmas morning. It isn't enough and he knows it. He wishes he could do more, give more, _be_ more. That he could be what she deserves. 

In the end, that's what this all comes down to. He can say he's laying low -that he's trying to keep her safe- until he's blue in the face but this is what's stopping him. From getting down from this stupid fire escape and walking into her building, ringing her doorbell. From seeing her.

All he can give her now is a promise. 

 _I'll see you soon_.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] thank you for all the lovely feedback on the first chapter- you have no idea how much i appreciate it! do let me know what you think of frank's POV- i'm always a little nervous of writing him 
> 
> [2] the ending for this was actually really hard, but i think i'm happy with it
> 
> [3] i hope you all have a lovely holiday season :)

**Author's Note:**

> [1] you _can_ actually buy the products Karen buys for Frank in this fic [here](https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/558142186/funny-veterinarian-gift-dog-lover-travel?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=i%20like%20big%20mutts&ref=sr_gallery_16) and [here](https://www.firebox.com/Fcking-Strong-Coffee/p6515?via=related-products) \- i mean... you probably can't buy them in NYC shops but allow me some creative license on that one
> 
> [2] i have a Frank POV companion to this in the works - i wrote it almost concurrently to this so it is nearly done. i hope to post it before christmas but i am a human disaster so don't quote me on that.
> 
> [3] the lines from 'In the bleak midwinter' by Christina Rossetti- yes, i did sort of steal this character trait from Tommy Shelby of peaky blinders but i like to imagine the poem would appeal to Frank as well!  
>  _In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,_  
>  _Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;_  
>  _Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,_  
>  _In the bleak midwinter, long ago._
> 
> [3] please please let me know what you think! i love reading your thoughts :)


End file.
